Brilliant! Harmonix has just announced the launch of “Rock Band Bar Nights,” “a ground-breaking initiative providing tools for U.S. bar owners to host their own Rock Band Nights.”
Plenty of bars — especially in tech-savvy towns like San Francisco — have been hosting informal Guitar Hero and/or Rock Band nights since the first Guitar Hero came out. So it’s a pretty slick idea for Harmonix to put together an official package.
While the company will be providing bar owners a bunch of promotional materials and other support, the main benefit to players will be a centralized database of Rock Band Bar Nights that will be tied into RockBand.com, Facebook, Twitter, and an iPhone app. Well, that and the likelihood of more Rock Band nights in their vicinity.
I just have one concern, though: Could making Rock Band easier to set up for bars make them even less likely to book live bands? Corollary: Given the quality of many bar bands, is this a bad thing?
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While I love the idea, it seems like the execution might be tough in a real bar – I have a hard enough time navigating the UI with experienced rock band players, with people accidentally hitting buttons, forgetting whether they’re guitar or bass, and sorting through the song list for eight minutes at a stretch. I grant that it’s possible we might just be idiots, but I envision long periods of downtime between songs.
In the best case scenario, HMX would add a bar-mode UI that’d allow people to jump in/out more quickly.
I’m hoping that’s the case. The “more info” page (which doesn’t really provide much) does say this: “Exclusive music solution offering the full Rock Band music catalogue of over 800 songs.”
Makes me think they’re working on a special bar edition. If I had to guess I’d say that they’ll probably just have the host/emcee controlling everything.
That’s a good point – they also say there’s a “turnkey” solution, which does seem to imply an ease-of-use that the retail product doesn’t really offer.
I’m a sucker for RB, so I’ll be out there regardless…